Q960874

VirtualDub is a free and open-source video capture and video processing utility for Microsoft Windows written by Avery Lee. It is designed to process linear video streams, including filtering and recompression. It uses AVI container format to store captured video. The first version of VirtualDub, written for Windows 95, to be released on SourceForge was uploaded on August 20, 2000.

In 2009, the third-party software print guide Learning VirtualDub referred to VirtualDub as "the leading free Open Source video capture and processing tool". Due to its "powerful" versatility and usefulness especially in the field of video processing (see below), PC World has referred to VirtualDub as "something of a 'Photoshop' for video files", PC Perspective recommends it for its low overhead, and nextmedia's PC & Tech Authority particularly praises it for its Direct stream copy feature to avoid generational degradation of video quality when performing simple editing and trimming tasks and the fact that VirtualDub "offers several valuable features that other packages lack, and helps you get quick results without any fuss or patronising wizards".